PREVENT A ‘SCRAMBLE’ FOR JOBS
1958The NewsletterPeter Kerrigan Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
‘Horpes. of “work-starved” vessels scramble for the few crumbs of employment currently on offer,’ wrote the Journal of Commerce for Maren 26, in an articie on the slump in shipping.
182 ships are now laid up in British ports because they cannot get cargoes. That is already a third of the total tonnage laid up in the worst years of the 1930s.
That can mean ‘hordes’ of dockers ‘scrambling for employment’ in the future, unless we resist a return to the hungry thirties.
All of us who were in the industry before the war have our memories of those days, of 500 men milling around the employer's stand for eighty jobs.
In. the Iecal ale-house More often than not a good number of these jobs had already been allocated in the local ale-house the night before in exchange for the foreman’s ale. The militant who tried to work to union rule was seldom hired.
To prevent a return to the conditions of those days, to protect the livelihood of all dockers, we must work out a militant policy behind which all portworkers, irrespective of union or port, can unite.
In order to maintain their profits the employers will seek to use mechanization and smaller gangs to undermine the dockers’ conditions of work.
Liverpool dockers, like other portworkers, have had experience of this. Even elementary mechanization, such as the use of pallet boards in connexion with stacker trucks, has meant a greater exploitation of workers ‘privileged’ to use the pallet process. It has made workers redundant and has meant bigger profits.
When pallet boards were introduced in 1949 and the early